Transbop0103.2 (Page 4 - 1) - The Transbay Creative Music Calendar

san francisco bay area
monthly publication for
experimental/improvised/
noise/electronic/freejazz/
o u t r o c k / 21s t c e n t u r y
music and sonic art
January 3002
1502 8th Street, Oakland, CA 94607
http://sfsound.org/transbay.html
transbay@sfsound.org
January 2003
The Transbay Creative Music Calendar is a volunteer-produced free monthly journal for non-commercial
creative new music in the San Francisco Bay Area. In
addition to our comprehensive listing of upcoming
events, we publish articles and reviews about local
music and the people who create it. We talk about a
wide range of modern music, including: experimental,
improvised, noise, electronic, free-jazz, outrock, 21st
century compositions, and sonic art. Each month, 1000
copies of the transbay are mailed to individuals and
hand delivered to over 45 performance venues and
public locations throughout the Bay Area. Pick one up
at the next show you attend!
Your kind donations help keep the Transbay alive and
growing. Please send checks [payable to “Transbay
Music Calendar”] to: Transbay Accounting, 545 Valle
Vista #4, Oakland, CA 94610.
Please visit our web site or contact us directly for more
information about getting your FREE subscription,
submitting content, listing an event, advertising, viewing
archives, or volunteering.
(Photos in this issue: Michael Paine, Tim Perkis, Tim Duff,
and Kathy Gresham-Lancaster)
2002 Top Ten Concerts
Or, what weeks of being cooped up inside on account of
El Niño will do to an obsessive-compulsive type...
ma++
1/11-12 [Transparent Theater]
Transparent Tape Music Festival I
Good compositions with great sound over 16
loudspeakers. Saturday was packed –
people had to sit behind speakers!
sponsored in part by
AMOEBA
Music
2455 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley
1855 Haight Street, San Francisco
Submission deadline for the February 2003 issue is January 15th.
Please send Quick Calendar events separately in the proper format.
1/27 [ACME]
Jane Rigler, flute Equally virtuosic in
improv and composed music. Check her out
when she is in town in 2003.
3/21 [GLENN SPEARMAN FESTIVAL]
Peter Brötzmann, Marco Eneidi,
Jackson Krall Sometimes you just gotta
blow, and these guys did continuously for
over an hour - the smile never left my face...
The Transbay Calendar
protected under the Freedom of Inflammation Act
4/21 [ACME]
Rubber O Cement and Hans Grüsel’s
Krankenkabinett The best of the Bay
Area’s ‘High-Speed’ electronic noise with
elaborate cardboard sets and costumes. If
you haven’t checked out this scene yet you
should. It’s like ‘Art-Music’ turned inside out.
Matt Ingalls
Rent Romus
Tom Djll
Scott Looney
John Lee
David Slusser
Jim Ryan
5/16 [strictly Ballroom]
Roaratoreyhough Brian Ferneyhough
reading his poetry: Weird! Actually gave a
lot of insight into his music.
Ernesto Diaz-Infante
You asked for ‘em — and we deliver! The sartorial
sybarites of Fuzzybunny in stunning evening wear: Tim
Perkis Bunny, Chris Nutbrown Hare, and Scot
Gresham-LancastEars. Caught at the Post-Glamour
Summit 2002, New Langton Arts, 9/28.
David Bithell, Mark Chung and Hugh Livingston of sfSound perform “Centering,” by Earle Brown, ACME,12/14.
6/23 & 9/1 [ACME]
TriaxiumWest plays Anthony Braxton
Complete synthesis of improvisation and composition - all from stupidly simple compositions.
Very inspiring. Kudos to John Shiurba for
organizing these concerts!
10/23 [KZSU 90.1fm]
Day of Noise: Morgan
Guberman, solo voice
Great combination of abstract
timbre and psychological drama.
Watch out for those Pacifica
words...
11/8 [ACME @ CMC]
Bran (...) Pos Very rare to hear
live laptop/electronics with such
musical depth, and the Bran can
pull it off! His stuff still sounds like
a classical symphony to me.
Honorable Mentions:
1/22 [strictly Ballroom] Mark
Menzies, solo violin
2/8 [New Langton Arts] John
Shiurba’s “30 Interjections” and
“TRIPLICATE”
Kristin Miltner and her upside-down apple, New Futures,11/14.
4/28 [The LAB] John Zorn’s
COBRA & Brown Bunny
Ensemble
5/6 [UC Berkeley] Russell
Greenberg, solo percussion
May [SFALT Festival]
May [Pauline Oliveros Festival]
5/23 [strictly Ballroom] Chris
Jones, piano
6/2 [Presidio Chapel] Worn
Ensemble plays Xenakis
6/28 [Olympia Experimental
Music Festival] The Abstractions
7/19-21 [Goat Hall] Hugh
Livingston’s New Opera
7/14 [ACME] 2nd Annual
Transbay Skronkathon BBQ
7/27 [New Langton Arts] Dan
Plonsey’s New Opera
8/16-18 [Transparent Theater]
Transparent Tape Music Festival II
9/22 [Berkeley Art Center]
Duo Contour Contemporary music performers [tpt & perc] from Germany. Very
nice to hear new music played with clean
virtuosity and emotional power.
9/30 [SFCMP] Chris Burns’ The
Location of Six Geometric Figures
10/12 [ACME]
Frank Gratkowski & Gino Robair
Although not as good as the Art Rattan show
a few years back, this still was one of the
best new music/improv shows of the year.
12/7 [ACME] Fluxus
Performances
Oct [SF Opera] Messiaen’s “St.
Francis of Assisi”
10/15 [ACME] MicroFest of
Vocal Performances
12/14 [ACME] 50th
Anniversary of Earle Brown’s
‘December 1952’
Above: Bitter Pie & D. Slusser, New Futures @ Tenderloft, 11/14.
Below: George Cremaschi, Larry Ochs, and
Saadet Türköz at the Noe Valley Ministry, 11/9.
Caroliner Rainbow Unalloyed
Self–Propelled Snake Tail
Wax Walker
(Brutal Sound Effects #20: A Tribute to Country)
December 14. 5lowershop, San Francisco
George Cremaschi
A post–storm night in San Francisco. A big art
student warehouse. Drop cloths for walls. Lots of
junk art . A pool of piss in the bathroom. A guy with
face tattoos behind the bar. You get the picture. I
walk in for LoVid – nice distorted videos with what
sounds like somebody playing with the tip of a live
guitar cable. Crunch. Crunch crunch crunch. Crunch
crunch crunch crunch crunch. Crunch. Later, I see one
of them walking around with a very young baby –
WITHOUT EARPLUGS. The baby, that is. Or, at least,
I couldn’t see them. The earplugs, that is. Let’s hope
they were there, or else: child abuse. Another act –
two people with cowboy sorta looking outfits making
noise (there was a cowboy theme to the evening),
pretty run of the mill except for the guy on the vocal
sounds who SUCKED.
cont’d on p. 5
Cremaschi on Caroliner cont’d from p. 2
I went out to the bar, and came back in to
Thomas Dimuzio’s Ha Ha Holster, which was just
Thomas Dimuzio and all of his gear. Interesting
sounds, uninteresting structure. Note to laptop/
noise people: IT”S CALLED COMPOSITION. The
Bran(…)Pos was next. What can I say? One of
the Bay Area’s best; only the uncertain ending
kept it from being PURE genius, instead it was
PRETTY MUCH genius.
Next up, the Big Event: Caroliner Rainbow,
newly resurrected these days from the dustbins
of Legendary–ness. Led by the infamous Noartoots,
Pied Piper to a new generation of noisemakers
and costume–wearers. Hidden all evening
behind a curtain (or was it a giant sheet?), the
amazing Day–Glo–with–many–blacklights set
mesmerized me right from the start: Noartoots
understands the theater of performance.
Bona–fide INSTALLATION ART. Brilliant, man,
pass the sunglasses – and I promise not to make
some lame 70’s/blacklight/Pink Floyd reference. (WATCH OUT! Don’t spill the bongwater!)
The show: Drumbo shuffle, Trout Mask “The
Blimp” vocals, improv (who’s that fiddle player?),
another “song”, more frantic singing, more noisy
improv (who’s that slide guitar player?), drummer
and keyboard people switch, more “songs”,
more noise, bass player “sings” (Blimp again),
giant motorized mannequin things gyrate, banjo
song (nice), drummer playing with chains, obnoxious girl in audience can’t stop hippie dancing,
and I mean CAN NOT, (wasn’t there a scene in
a movie like that?) Noartoots beats on audience
with costume part (soft), more instrument
switching, more “songs”, more noise, the end.
And did I mention the fabulous costumes?
The Artship
Recordings
Hugh Livingston, producer
50 mini-cd releases since August
2001
Tom Djll
The Artship series began when cellist/producer Hugh Livingston was given
access
to
a
decaying
pre-WW2
cargo/troop ship anchored at Oakland’s
Pier 10. He invited some improvisors aboard
to record some solos, and, before you could
say “shiver me timbres,” the Artship
Recordings were launched. Now, a year
and fifty discs later, the Bay Area-based
series is charting new waters with duo
recordings of Fred Frith/Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Alvin Curran/Cenk Ergun, and more.
Although one could say all the solo
discs have really been duos. The ship itself is
a formidable partner in each improvisor’s
excursion, and it offers an astonishing range
of ambiences. Each player is given a shipboard tour, then s/he selects the spot where
they’d like to record. The mics are set up and
the player gets one take of twenty-one minutes or less. The collected results reflect the
wide artistic range and high standards of
Bay Area musicians.
So it’s a measure of the omnivorous
musicality of Gino Robair that his turn in the
booming Cargo Hold Number Nine is such
a lovely, open-skies constellation of aural
mysteries. On the other hand, the obsessive
Jerome Bryerton (one of the selected extraBay Area players featured) gets crammed
into the claustrophobic Deck Gear Closet,
along with some broken light bulbs, buckets
and dual vacuum cleaners, and disgorges a
cavalcade of junken perversity. Laptoppers
Tim Perkis and John Bischoff (both of the late
computer-network group The Hub) take
opposing tacks to their solos. Bischoff, in
‘Tween-Deck Cargo Access Shaft Two, plots
magisterial cadences with dense polytonal
clusterbombs and hissing roars; Perkis,
abovedecks, allows wind and seabirds and
passing boats to camouflage his raspy, burbling comings and goings. Soprano saxist
Phillip Greenlief pipes a keening ramble in
The Dance Theatre; David Slusser, on tenor
and soprano, cracks some jaunty Popeyed
asides.
Livingston’s own disk (in the Art Deco
Salon) is a suite which slips from medieval
hurdy-gurdy to the far reaches of Nomos
Alpha and ambient soundscrapes. Bassist
Matthew Sperry gets hijacked by his infant
daughter’s gurgles and cries (actually, it’s
one of the best bass solos I’ve ever heard),
and saxist Henry Kuntz saws his Mexican
log violin in a torturous dronefest with a
giant electrical transformer. (Hurts good.)
With fifty artists to choose from, the
Artship series makes an excellent primer for
Bay Area improvised music. They’re available locally at Amoeba Records.
Fluxus 2002:
Evander Music Winter Festival
Sound on
Survival
marco eneidi, alto saxophone
lisle ellis, contrabass
peter valsamis, drums
friday nite January 10
the hemlock tavern
10pm
1131 Polk St., San Francisco
415 923 0923
www.marcoeneidi.com
Paolo Angeli (from Italy)
squiggle
Greg Goodman Trio
Three Wheeler
Saturday, January 25th
21 Grand
449 23rd Street, Oakland
Sunday, January 26th
Capp Street Music Center
20th & Capp Street, San Francisco
9 pm - Paolo Angeli
8 pm - Greg Goodman Trio
Solo prepared Sardinian guitar
Cross an acoustic/electric guitar with a cello and a sitar,
and you might have an idea of what a Sardinian guitar is
like. Not only is this evening an essential listening experience to hear such an instrument, Paolo Angeli is a virtuoso
performer in the best possible sense of the word. Nels
Cline, Fred Frith and Derek Bailey all have something in
common with Angeli: virtuosic control, reckless abandon,
and the highest level of improvisational skills combined in
an utterly individualistic style. Don’t miss this concert!
At left, Los Cinco Fluxereños
del Mas Grande Sabor en
Todo El Mundo perform
extreme invasive massage
on a beam of supine pine.
Robair, Guberman, ingalls,
Shiurba, Duff on acoustic
hammers. Below, beforeand-after: John Shiurba
saws a lady in half, and,
metaphorically, 1000 years
of Western Civilization.
Greg Goodman - piano
Bruce Ackley - saxophones
George Cremaschi - bass
9 pm - Three Wheeler
10 pm - squiggle
Phillip Greenlief - woodwinds
Shoko Hikage - koto
Dana Reason - piano
Tom Djll: trumpet, prepared trumpet
Phillip Greenlief: woodwinds
Tim Perkis: electronics
For more info: (510) 652-7914
www.evandermusic.com
Transbay Creative Music Calendar • Jan 2003 • 2
Transbay Creative Music Calendar • Jan 2003 • 5
January Quick Calendar
Fri 1/3 8p $10/5 Meridian
[545 Sutter, San Francisco]
Philip Gelb: shakuhachi compositions by
Yuji Takahashi and Gelb
Sat 1/4 12p Audible Method
[60 Golf Club Rd, Pleasant Hill]
Yehudit, Unwoman, Lx Rudis,
Nihil Communication
Mon 1/6 8p FREE strictly Ballroom
[Stanford]
Gartner/Ingalls/Jones play
Lachenmann/Xenakis/Ingalls/Debussy
Tue 1/7 9p $3 26Mix
[Mission@26, San Francisco]
Sagan, Wobbly, Lance Grabmiller,
DJ Zygote
Wed 1/8 10p Hemlock Tavern
[1131 Pol, San Francisco]
Young People, Blevin Blectum, and
Ryan Junell
Thu 1/9 8p $6-10 Luggage Store
[1007 Market, SF]
Guided Improv Sessions
Thu 1/9 10a+Noon FREE CSU
[Hayward]
The Art Lande/Paul McCandless Group
Thu 1/9 9p Bottom of the Hill
[1233 17th, San Francisco]
Toychestra & Mark Growden’s
Electric Pinata
Fri 1/10 8p $12 Old First Church
[1751 Sacramento, San Francisco]
Phillip Flavin – shamisen, voice; Shoko
Hikage – koto; Tamie Kooyenaga – koto;
Michiyo Koga – koto; Shirley Muramoto –
koto; Philip Gelb – shakuhachi; Robin
Hartshorne – shakuhachi; Masayuki Koga –
shakuhachi
Fri 1/10 10p Hemlock Tavern
[1131 Polk, San Francisco]
Marco Eneidi, Lisle Ellis, and Peter Valsamis
1/10-11 21Grand
[449B 23rd St, Oakland]
Sound/Shift: 2 days of continuous
improvised music
Sat 1/11 4p Atlas Cafe
[20th & Alabama, San Francisco]
Bruno Pelletier Quartet
Thu 1/16 8p $6-10 Luggage Store
[1007 Market, SF]
Stephen Ruiz/Lance Grabmiller and
Lisle Ellis/Chris Brown
1/16&18 8p $21-45 Zellerbach
[UC Berkeley]
Berkeley Symphony: Unsuk Chin Orchestra
+ Electronics (Premiere)
Mandell “Flute Concerto” (Premiere)
Sat 1/18 8p $8/$6 New Langton
Arts [1246 Folsom, San Francisco]
Wadada Leo Smith
Sat 1/18 8p $10 Jazzschool
[2087 Addison, Berkeley]
Composer Portraits: Larry Polansky
Sun 1/19 7.5p $8/10 SIMM
[116 9th, San Francisco]
Merlin Coleman & Lisle Ellis/Chris Brown
Sun 1/19 3p $20 1st Congr. Church
[Dana&Durant, Berkeley]
Russian School Benefit: Podobedov/
Hartigan/Hanson Trio
Mon 1/20 8p Yoshi’s [510
Embarcadero, Oakland]
Nels Cline Singers
Thu 1/23 8p $6-10 Luggage Store
[1007 Market, SF]
Thomas Scandura/Ernesto Diaz-infante/
Jesse Quattro
Sat 1/25 9p 21Grand [449B 23rd
St, Oakland]
Paolo Angeli & squiggle
Sat 1/25 7p The Ramp
[2236 Parker St, Berk]
why? (anticon), wobbly, create!
Sun 1/26th 8p CMC
[20th & Capp, SF]
Greg Goodman Trio & Three Wheeler
Mon 1/27 8p $18 Theater
[Yerba Buena, San Francisco]
SFContempPlayers: Cage Retrospective with
Frith/Winant/Jeanrenaud/Goff
Tue 1/28 8p $10 TUVA
[3192 Adeline, Berk]
Good for Cows, Invocation Trio
Thu 1/30 8p $6-10 Luggage Store
[1007 Market, SF]
Paolo Angeli and Mark Trayle
Thu 1/30 8p FREE strictly Ballroom
[Stanford]
Morris Palte, solo percussion: Stockhausen &
Dillon
Fri 1/31 8p $10 Mills College
[5000 MacArthur, Oakland]
Toshimaru Nakamura, Maggi Payne,
John Bischoff
Fri 1/31 8p Hertz [UC Berkeley]
Orchestre National De Lyon:
Stravinsky/Boulez/Schoenberg
Fri 1/31 8p $6-10 21Grand
[449B 23rd St, Oak]
Damon Smith and Invocation Trio
Transbay Creative Music Calendar • Jan 2003 • 3
More Best-of-’02 Lists
Tom Duff
3/17 Vorticella at ACME Observatory
One of my favorite small-sounds groups.
3/26 sfSound Orchestra performing
Feldman box notation pieces at The
Black Box. Another small-sounds night.
4/21 United Noise Toys Plus at ACME
Observatory Small-sounds part Trois...
The Djll list
8/12 Trio Natto + Chris Brown at
Headlands Center This show nearly
eclipsed all others of recent years, in my
estimation. Hikage, Gelb and Perkis plus
Brown’s inside-piano playing: soon to be
released on CD so you can argue with me.
(Reviewed in our September 2002 issue.)
4/28 John Zorn’s Cobra, mediated
by Willie Winant at The Lab Definitely
not small sounds. What a load of fun.
Jan & Aug Transparent Tape Festivals
What a great format of High Modernism, far
from the musty halls of quackademia: Sit in
the dark and get hammered from all sides by
a chorus of whoops and yibbles. Note: I depart
from Duff in his praise of the Subotnick.
5/10 sfSound group performing
something like Ligeti’s 10 Pieces for
Woodwind Quintet at the SF ALT
Festival at 21 Grand Hmm. Maybe
small sounds was a theme this year.
7/14 Transbay BBQ/Skronkathon
Why can’t we all just have a good time and
get along? This is a good place to start. No
stars, no agendas, just good playing and
good eats.
6/1 Cardew Choir performing
Pauline Oliveros’s Wind Horse at
Sounding the Margins, the Pauline
Oliveros festspiel.
7/28 Allen/Goodheart/Powell Trio
at SIMM A sterling example of how good
a group can get if good musicians just play
together for awhile. Garth Powell’s singing
saw still echoes haunting refrains in my ear.
6/18 Shoko Hikage shredding out on
Sakura Sakura, in response to an audience request to “give us an idea how regular music sounds on that thing” at an
ARTSHIP Recordings release party at the
Oakland Art Gallery.
7/14 Joseph Zitt’s solo vocal set at the
2nd Annual Transbay Skronkathon
BBQ at ACME Observatory. Creative
and entertaining. The Bay Area won big when
Joe decided to move here from New Jersey.
8/18 Morton Subotnick’s Until Spring
at the 2nd Transparent Tape Music
Festival at the Transparent Theater.
This piece is a virtual dissertation on tempo,
rhythm and meter. It’s not often that something this abstract is this exciting and visceral.
11/1 Frank Gratkowski at Meridian
This had to be about the most memorable
solo reeds performance I’ve seen since
Anthony Braxton’s heyday in the late seventies. (What a shame I was the only paying
audience member...) Frank’s control of
tonguing and multiphonics was superhuman;
enfolded in a musical concept that was
rhizomatic yet always graspable and logical. Then, when he played the “clari-hachi”
(a clarinet with mouthpiece removed; blown
like a shakuhachi), all jaws dropped to the
floor. Especially Philip Gelb’s!
10/28 Kazuhisa Uchihashi solo at
Songlines, Mills College Ensemble Rm
Guitar-looper fantasias and daxophone
excavations. (Reviewed in 12.02 Transbay.)
9/15 Microfestival of Vocal
Improvisation at ACME Observatory. Half a dozen solo vocalists
did short sets. I organized this
show, and was surprised that the format worked so well. It didn’t hurt
that all the performers (Patrick
Barber, David Bithell, Morgan
Guberman, Arjuna, Bob Marsh,
Jesse Quattro) were all first rate.
We’re going to do this again.
11/12 Rolling Stones, Oakland
Coliseum Arena Tickets for this
show cost more than ACME
Observatory’s total take on an average night. The Stones only get better
with age. Charlie Watts’s drumming
was unbelievable.
11/12 Earle Brown concert at Black Box
A huge advance in musicality beyond the
Feldman concert, both of which were put
together by ma++ ingalls and performed by
the expanded sfSound group.
May-June Sounding the Margins: The
Pauline Oliveros 70th Birthday
Tribute Concerts International in scope,
marathon in design, top-notch in execution.
Highlights: For Malcolm Goldstein with
Perkis, Brown and Bischoff; Sarah Cahill in
Trio for Piano, Flute, and Page-Turner; trio of
Oliveros, Toyoji Tomita and Shoko Hikage.
10/1 Emergency String Quartet at
Black Box Local group demonstrates how
free improvisation is supposed to work.
Some of our highly-touted out-of-town visitors
could’ve learn a thing or two at this show.
12/6 Greg Goodman, Paul Rutherford & Torsten Müller at Finger Palace
Goodman’s contribution to this heavyweight
duo heisted it into the realms of the ecstatic.
Lexa Walsh, George Cremaschi and long-neck
bottles at the Black Box Xmas party, 12/17.
Black Box Xmas Party
Thanks to John Lee, the master behind
www.bayimproviser.com, for bringing everybody together for some great food, drink,
and schmoozing. A shame there were no
aesthetic fistfights to report.
Some of Bonban’s
Memorable
Shows of 2002
Brutal Sound Effects #20
@ 5lowershop
Bran (...) Pos @ CMC
Nautical Almanac @ Kimo's
Toxic Tire Beach in August
Looney’s laptop looms out of the darkness while Djll makes
pig-grunting sounds. The Sluss-O-Matic looms in foreground.
New Futures Audio Workshop @ Tenderloft,11/14
Adobe Books Pancake Show
Caroliner @ Great American
Transbay Creative Music Calendar • Jan 2003 • 4